Location Ideas

Setting and location is an important part of any film, and choosing the correct place to film can make or break the whole project. Our group has had many long discussions about where we feel the most productive location to film is. After we had our finished basic idea and had begun storyboarding, we had to decide how the particular location we would choose would affect the mood and tone of the film itself. To start with, we contemplated what the location should look like, before searching for somewhere that we already knew. For example, for the opening scene with the dead body in the bathtub, the group decided on what look we thought the bathroom should have, rather than choosing to settle on a bathroom in the home of one of the group members.

For the opening scene, we agreed that the bathroom and the bath itself had to be clinical. The body is calm, as if the prospect of death had lingered in the air for some time. To film this artistic death in an uninteresting, stereotypical family bathroom would have completely taken the impact away from this scene. Whoever the body is, this death has not been rushed and we wanted to give the bathroom the look of someone that is tidy and organised, and that his demise is just one of the things to tick off from his list of things to do on that day. A white bath with white tiles on the walls would be the perfect location for this scene. If there are any images on the walls, they may make the scene look amateur and lazy, depending on what the images are. This scene is probably the most important in our film and is our main controlling idea, so our group has decided to search thoroughly for the bathroom closest to the original ideas in our mind. In a perfect world, the bathroom would look similar to the one used in the film ‘Garden State’ (Dir. Zach Braff, 2004). At the beginning of the film, the character of Andrew ‘Large’ Largeman is heavily sedated and his whole house is very plain and clean. The walls are white, the bathroom is large and the bath itself is swallowed by the rest of the room. This use of setting was very cleverly chosen and gives the opening to the film the feeling of loneliness, but with a hint of OCD about cleanliness. The scene also has the look of purgatory, a big bland of nothing. If our scene looked similar to this, it would give the audience the feeling that the character already feels like he is on his way to death, and is just speeding up the inevitable.

Another important scene in our film is the discussion between the psychiatrist and the patient. This scene would require a psychiatrist’s office, but because we have no budget we must improvise. In our storyboard, the room is predominantly brown, with many books on shelves and a large desk. The two characters would be situated in the centre of the room in different chairs. The psychiatrist’s chair is small and comfy, making him look big and almost like a higher power. The patient’s chair is vastly different, huge and overbearing around him, making him look feeble and unimportant. This scene was well thought out throughout our group, but we realised that this location with the correct iconography would be almost impossible to find and use. Therefore, we decided that the specific chairs idea could be dropped if needed. We will continue to search for a similar-looking room. Any room that looks like it has been used daily for many years with many books or shelves could easily be seen as a psychiatrist’s office. A similar location to the one we are aiming for is in the film ‘There Will Be Blood’ (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). In a scene towards the end of the movie, Daniel Plainview is now very successful and living in a large house and his adopted son comes to visit him. Daniel is sitting behind a huge desk, and the room itself is also domineering and has a very arrogant feel to it. Shelves filled with books stagger the sides of the room and the walls are barely visible. A room similar to this is what we are aiming for. Of course, a room of that magnitude is most likely not going to be found by us to use, but if we could take specific elements from it our scene would come to life and be similar to the original ideas that we planned.

The title sequence is also an important scene to talk about in terms of location. The point of the title scene (apart from show our names) is to show the slowly diminishing mind of the main character. To portray this, the title sequence begins with a dolly shot of the beautiful countryside. After this shot, the images became more unattractive to the audience. The images and the main character’s mind are alike. The idea presented to us as a group was to film field and industrial based buildings as we were approaching location. The main mode of transport to get to these locations was by car (driven by Dave Waters). This then would get in the way of our shooting schedule, and it would be an extremely effective shot to use for the title sequence. One of our inspirations for this came from the Pink Floyd album ‘Animals’. The picture of just a factory and the smoke was the reason we decided to have the psyche decline in the title sequence by using images from the industrial world. The beginning of the title sequence where the beauty of nature is captured to imply sanity within the psyche of the main character is very important to capture correctly. Because of this, the location needed to be beautiful, open and easy to get to. We eventually decided to film the country side whilst within the car, to gain a really different dolly shot of the countryside. The idea for the countryside came from last year’s opening to a thriller ‘Allegiance’. The very first thing you see is the grass in a field, until the shot pans up and you see an unknown character being hanged from a tree. Instead of just the two seconds of just beauty, then shock, we plan to prolong the beauty and the depressing images to give the audience a chance to get into the mood of the film.

Overall, the locations we have chosen for our film have been chosen very specifically to allow the audience to feel the emotion we plan to emit from the scenes within our films. If the locations aren’t what we plan them to be like, our film won’t have the same emotion and it won’t be as effective. Based on this, location is very important to our project, and following the guide which we have set for our group would be very wise indeed.